Cuca’s 1987 Swiss Arrest and the In Absentia Sentence Annulled in 2023

In 1987, Alexi Stival—known in Brazilian football as Cuca—was arrested in Bern while traveling with Grêmio. The arrest followed allegations involving a 13-year-old girl and turned a team trip into a Swiss criminal case. Eduardo Henrique Hamester, Henrique Arlindo Etges, and Fernando Castoldi, three of Cuca’s Grêmio teammates, were arrested in the same matter. The immediate facts were narrow: four players had entered Swiss custody, and a hotel room had become the center of an allegation that would remain attached to Cuca for decades.

The Bern case concerned an allegation that the girl had been raped in the hotel room. Her age was central to the legal process. She was 13, while the accused players were members of a professional football club traveling internationally. The case therefore moved beyond the ordinary discipline of a team or federation. Swiss authorities treated it as a criminal proceeding, with the question of consent joined to the separate legal consequences of sexual contact with a minor.

Two of the accused players admitted having sex with the girl. They said they believed the encounter was consensual and that they did not know she was underage. Those statements supplied the defense position that entered the public account of the case. They did not resolve the legal dispute. The Swiss court later assessed Cuca’s case through its own proceeding, and the resulting judgment imposed criminal liability for conduct classified as a sexual act with a minor and coercion.

Cuca’s case did not end with the 1987 arrest. Two years later, a Swiss court convicted him in absentia, meaning the judgment was entered without him present in court, and imposed a 15-month prison sentence. The ruling gave the case a formal legal outcome distinct from the allegations and competing accounts that had preceded it. It also created a penalty that could follow Cuca across borders, even though the court reached its decision without his physical presence before the Swiss bench.

The sentence was specific. The Swiss court imposed 15 months for engaging in a sexual act with a minor and coercion. That language placed the judgment inside the criminal law rather than the disciplinary codes governing players, clubs, or tournaments. Cuca had been a footballer when the Bern arrest occurred; by the time of the conviction, the court had reduced the dispute to a criminal sentence bearing his name. The legal finding remained in place even though the prison term was never served.

Cuca did not serve the 15-month sentence. No prison release marked the end of the case, because no custodial term was completed. The judgment existed as a court-imposed punishment, but it did not become time he spent behind bars. That separation shaped everything that followed. A conviction could remain part of a person’s public and legal history while the sentence itself moved toward expiration without physical execution.

In 2004, the sentence expired. The date closed the period in which the 15-month penalty could operate as an active prison term, but it did not transform the original conviction into a trial on different facts. For nearly two decades, the sentence remained an old legal judgment rather than a current custody matter. Cuca continued to exist in public life with the 1987 arrest and 1989 conviction attached to his name, while the punishment itself had run its course.

The legal status changed again on 28 December 2023. The Swiss judiciary voided Cuca’s sentence without issuing a new judgment on the underlying conduct. The action followed a judge’s view that the 1989 case had produced an unfair verdict. Prosecutors took a different procedural position: they argued that the offense had prescribed, meaning the time allowed for prosecution had expired under Swiss law. Neither point reopened the case as a new trial on the merits.

The annulment therefore addressed the legal standing of the old sentence. It did not release Cuca from prison; the sentence had already expired and had never been served. It did not replace the 1989 conviction with a fresh finding of guilt or innocence. The Swiss court removed the sentence through judicial action after the earlier proceeding was judged unfair and the prosecution raised prescription. The result was legal nullification, not a new factual adjudication.

That left the case with two separate endpoints. In 1989, Cuca was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 15 months for a sexual act with a minor and coercion. In 2023, the Swiss judicial system voided that sentence without deciding the underlying allegations anew. The 1987 arrest, the hotel-room allegation involving a 13-year-old girl, and the competing accounts of consent remained the historical foundation of the dispute. The final Swiss order settled the status of the sentence while leaving the underlying conduct outside a new merits judgment.